I was thinking a bit about how Fox News covered the Benghazi attack vs. how it has covered the pandemic. When I did a little digging into the numbers, it was just... depressing. https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/decade-after-screaming-about-nonexistent-death-panels-fox-news-downplaying

This was Fox in the 20 months following the Benghazi attack. Detailed, right? https://www.mediamatters.org/sean-hannity/report-foxs-benghazi-obsession-numbers

This month, Fox has turned its focus on how onerous COVID-19 mitigation efforts are, all but ignoring the death toll https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-complained-about-coronavirus-health-measures-nearly-5-times-often-it-reported

A week of Fox programming in September 2020 looks like this:

And as much as their narrative is that either we just don't know if lockdowns work or offering a complete dismissal of the strategy, evidence suggests otherwise, saving millions of lives globally https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/06/09/872441984/modelers-suggest-pandemic-lockdowns-saved-millions-from-dying-of-covid-19

Fox can pretend to care about American deaths from diseases... but only if it suits them politically.

In 2014, they rode Ebola scaremongering all the way to a Senate majority (even though the Obama administration's Ebola response was solid). https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/after-riding-ebola-fears-victory-2014-right-wing-media-are-playing-politics

Not sure if everyone remembers, but right-wing media's Ebola coverage was absolutely bonkers, full of conspiracy theories that Obama was trying to intentionally infect Americans and stuff. https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/after-riding-ebola-fears-victory-2014-right-wing-media-are-playing-politics

Once the 2014 election was over, though, conservative commentators could do a 180 on what they'd been saying just weeks earlier, like this example about funding:

And each criticism they tried to hit Obama with in 2014 for Ebola, every worst-case-scenario they outlined, has come true under Trump. But naturally, they find themselves playing defense for him. https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/after-riding-ebola-fears-victory-2014-right-wing-media-are-playing-politics

And that's really what gets me about people who casually say things like "Well, you've got Fox on the right and MSNBC on the left," as though that in any way begins to explain the power and influence Fox has as a full-fledged propaganda network.

Are MSNBC's opinion hosts left-of-center? Sure. Absolutely. I wouldn't say that any of them are as far left as people like Hannity or Ingraham are far right, but Maddow, Hayes, etc. are certainly left-of-center.

But they don't have the same amount of pull with Democratic politicians as Fox has with Republicans. Fox knows it can destroy the political careers of Republicans who don't show an appropriate level of fealty.

And also unlike Fox and the collection of right-wing media outlets like Breitbart, Gateway Pundit, Daily Caller, etc., there's no tight-knit network of smaller media outlets on the left to create the type of powerful, self-sustaining feedback loop that Republicans have.

Sometimes Fox gets its talking points from the president.

Sometimes the president gets his talking points from Fox.

In either case, they're a powerful entity that people can ignore at their own peril. And that's part of the reason why it's just... devastating that we ended up

here. 200,000 deaths. It didn't have to happen.

Fox could have influenced the president to take this more seriously, and it could have influenced other media outlets to treat this as a real threat instead of downplaying it as a political ploy. https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/decade-after-screaming-about-nonexistent-death-panels-fox-news-downplaying

How much outright contempt does a news channel have for its audience to spend time working from home because of COVID-19 fears all the while telling viewers that everything is fine and should just go back to normal?